“Well?”
She moved her shoulders uneasily.
“Not now.”
“But—Veronica. Why not?
We’ve known each other for a couple of years—”
“The truth is—I’m not sure about you, Johnny. Sometimes I think I love you. But sometimes I’m not sure I even like you.”
He frowned. “I don’t get that.”
“Well, I can’t explain it. It’s just that I think you could be either a very nice guy or a very nasty one. And I’d like to be quite certain first. Now I’ve got to go. It’s starting to rain.”
On that note she went out, leaving Fowler with a sour taste in his mouth. He mixed himself another drink and wandered over to his drawing board, where some sketches were sheafed up in a disorderly fashion. Nuts. He was making good dough at commercial art, he’d even got himself a rather special house—
One of the drawings caught his eye. It was a background detail, intended for incorporation later in a larger picture. It showed a gargoyle, drawn with painstaking care, and a certain quality of vivid precision that was very faintly unpleasant. Veronica—
Fowler suddenly remembered his guest and hastily set down his drink. He had avoided that room during the tour of inspection, managing to put the man completely out of his mind. That was too bad. He could have asked Veronica to send out a doctor from the village.
But the guest didn’t seem to need a doctor. He was working on the wall-switch, at some danger, Fowler thought, of electrocuting himself. “Look out!” Fowler said sharply. “It’s hot!” But the man merely gave him a mild, blank stare and passed his hand downward before the panel.
The light went out.
It came on again, to show the man finishing an upward gesture.
No toggle switch stub protruded from the slot in the center of the plate. Fowler blinked. “What—?” he said.
Gesture. Blackout, Another gesture.
“What did you do to that?” Fowler asked, but there was no audible reply.
Fowler drove south through the storm, muttering about ham electricians. Beside him the guest sat, smiling vacantly. The one thing Fowler wanted was to get the guy off his hands. A doctor, or a cop, in the village, would solve that particular problem. Or, rather, that would have been the solution, if a minor landslide hadn’t covered the road at a crucial point.
With difficulty Fowler turned the car around and drove back home, cursing gently.
The blank man sat obediently at his side.
They were marooned for three days. Luckily the larder was well-stocked, and the power lines, which ran underground, weren’t cut by the storm. The water-purifying unit turned the muddy stream from outside into crystalline nectar, the FM set wasn’t much bothered by atmospheric disturbances, and Fowler had plenty of assignments to keep him busy at his drawing board. But he did no drawing. He was exploring a fascinating, though unbelievable, development.
The light switch his guest had rigged was unique. Fowler discovered that when he took the gadget apart. The sealed plastic had been broken open, and a couple of wires had been rewound in an odd fashion. The wiring didn’t make much sense to Fowler. There was no photoelectric hookup that would have explained it. But the fact remained that he could turn on the lights in that room by moving his hand upward in front of the switch plate, and reverse the process with a downward gesture.
He made tests. It seemed as though an invisible fourteen-inch beam extended directly outward from the switch. At any rate, gestures, no matter how emphatic, made beyond that fourteen-inch distance had no effect on the lights at all.
Curious, he asked his guest to rig up another switch in the same fashion. Presently all the switches in the house were converted, but Fowler was no wiser. He could duplicate the hookup, but he didn’t understand the principle. He felt a little frightened.
Locked in the house for three days, he had time to wonder and worry. He fed his guest—who had forgotten the use of knife and fork, if he had ever known it—and he tried to make the man talk. Not too successfully.
Once the man said: “Forgotten . . . forgotten—”
“You haven’t forgotten how to be an electrician. Where did you come from?”
The blank face turned to him, “Where?” A pause. And then—
“When? Time . . . time—”
Once he picked up a newspaper and pointed questioningly at the date line—the year.
“That’s right,” Fowler said, his stomach crawling. “What year did you think it was?”
“Wrong—” the man said. “Forgotten—”
Fowler stared. On impulse, he got up to search his guest’s pockets. But there were no pockets. The suit was ordinary, though slightly strange in cut, but it had no pockets.
“What’s your name?”
No answer.
“Where did you come from? Another—time?”
Still no answer.
Fowler thought of robots. He thought of a soulless world of the future peopled by automatons. But he knew neither was the right answer. The man sitting before him was horribly normal. And empty, somehow—drained. Normal?
The norm? That non-existent, figurative symbol which would be monstrous if it actually appeared? The closer an individual approaches the norm, the more colorless he is. Just as a contracting line becomes a point, which has few, if any, distinguishing characteristics. One point is exactly like another point. As though humans, in some unpleasant age to come, had been reduced to the lowest common denominator.
The norm.
“All right,” Fowler said. “I’ll call you Norman, till you remember your right name. But you can’t be a . . . point. You’re no moron. You’ve got a talent for electricity, anyhow.”
Norman had other talents, too, as Fowler was to discover soon. He grew tired of looking through the window at the gray, pouring rain, pounding down over a drenched and dreary landscape, and when he tried to close the built-in Venetian shutters, of course they failed to work. “May that architect be forced to live in one of his own houses,” Fowler said, and, noticing Norman made explanatory gestures toward the window.
Norman smiled blankly.
“The view,” Fowler said. “I don’t like to see all that rain. The shutters won’t work. See if you can fix them. The view—” He explained patiently, and presently Norman went out to the unit nominally called a kitchen, though it was far more efficient. Fowler shrugged and sat down at his drawing board. He looked up, some while later, in time to see Norman finish up with a few swabs of a cloth. Apparently he had been painting the window with water.
Fowler snorted. “I didn’t ask you to wash it,” he remarked. “It was the shutters—”
Norman laid a nearly empty basin on a table and smiled expectantly. Fowler suffered a slight reorientation. “Time-traveling, ha,” he said. “You probably crashed out of some booby hatch. The sooner I can get you back there the better I’ll like it. If it’d only stop raining . . . I wonder if you could rig up the televisor? No, I forgot. We don’t even have one yet. And I suspect you couldn’t do it. That light switch business was a fluke.”
He looked out at the rain and thought of Veronica. Then she was there before him, dark and slender, smiling a little.
“Wha—” Fowler said throatily.
He blinked. Hallucinations? He looked again, and she was still there, three-dimensionally, outside the window—
Norman smiled and nodded. He pointed to the apparition.
“Do you see it too?” Fowler asked madly. “It can’t be. She’s outside. She’ll get wet. What in the name of—”
But it was only Fowler who got wet, dashing out bareheaded in the drenching rain. There was no one outside. He looked through the window and saw the familiar room, and Norman.
He came back. “Did you paint her on the window?” he asked. “But you’ve never seen Veronica. Besides, she’s moving—three-dimensional. Oh, it can’t be. My mind’s snapping. I need peace and quiet. A green thought in a green shade.”, He focus
ed on a green thought, and Veronica faded out slowly. A cool, quiet, woodland glade was visible through the window.
After a while Fowler figured it out. His window made thoughts visible.
It wasn’t as simple as that, naturally. He had to experiment and brood for quite some time. Norman was no help. But the fact finally emerged that whenever Fowler looked at the window and visualized something with strong emphasis, an image of that thought appeared—a projective screen, so to speak.
It was like throwing a stone into calm water. The ripples moved out for a while, and then slowly quieted. The woodland scene wasn’t static; there was a breeze there, and the leaves glittered and the branches swayed. Clouds moved softly across a blue sky. It was a scene Fowler finally recognized, a Vermont woodland he had seen years ago. Yet when did sequoias ever grow in Vermont?
A composite, then. And the original impetus of his thoughts set the scene into action along normal lines. When he visualized the forest, he had known that there would be a wind, and that the branches would move. So they moved. But slower and slower—though it took a long while for the action to run down.
He tried again. This time Chicago’s lake shore. Cars rushed along the drive. He tried to make them run backwards, but got a sharp headache and a sense of watching a jerky film. Possibly he could reverse the normal course of events, but his mind wasn’t geared to handle film running backward. Then he thought hard and watched a seascape appear through the glass. This time he waited to see how long it would take the image to vanish. The action stopped in an hour, but the picture did not fade completely for another hour.
Only then did the possibilities strike him with an impact as violent as lightning.
Considerable poetry has been written about what happens when love rejected turns to hate. Psychology could explain the cause as well as the effect—the mechanism of displacement. Energy has to go somewhere, and if one channel is blocked, another will be found. Not that Veronica had definitely rejected Fowler, and certainly his emotion for the girl had not suffered an alchemic transformation, unless one wishes to delve into the abysses of psychology in which love is merely the other face of hatred—but on those levels of semantic confusion you can easily prove anything.
Call it reorientation. Fowler had never quite let himself believe that Veronica wouldn’t fall into his arms. His ego was damaged. Consequently it had to find some other justification, some assurance—and it was unfortunate for Norman that the displacement had to occur when he was available as scapegoat. For the moment Fowler began to see the commercial possibilities of the magic windowpane, Norman was doomed.
Not at once; in the beginning, Fowler would have been shocked and horrified had he seen the end result of his plan. He was no villain, for there are no villains. There is a check-and-balance system, as inevitable in nature and mind as in politics, and the balance was beginning to tip when Fowler locked Norman in the windowless room for safekeeping and drove to New York to see a patent attorney. He was careful at first. He knew the formula for the telepathically-perceptive window paint by now, but he merely arranged to patent the light-switch gadget that was operated by a gesture. Afterwards, he regretted his ignorance, for clever infringements appeared on the heels of his own device. He hadn’t known enough about the matter to protect himself thoroughly in the patent.
By a miracle, he had kept the secret of the telepathic paint to himself. All this took time, naturally, and meanwhile Norman, urged on by his host, had made little repairs and improvements around the house. Some of them were impractical, but others were decidedly worth using—short-cuts, conveniences, clever methods of bridging difficulties that would be worth money in the open market. Norman’s way of thinking seemed curiously alien. Given a problem, he could solve it, but he had no initiative on his own. He seemed satisfied to stay in the house—
Well, satisfied was scarcely the word. He was satisfied in the same sense that a jellyfish is satisfied to remain in its pool. If there were quivers of volition, slight directional stirrings, they were very feeble indeed. There were times when Fowler, studying his guest, decided that Norman was in a psychotic state—catatonic stupor seemed the most appropriate label. The man’s will was submerged, if, indeed, he had ever had any.
No one has ever detailed the probable reactions of the man who owned the goose who laid the golden eggs. He brooded over a mystery, and presently took empirical steps, afterwards regretted. Fowler had a more analytical mind, and suspected that Norman might he poised at a precarious state of balance, during which—and only during which—he laid golden eggs. Metal can be pliable until pressure is used, after which it may become work-hardened and inflexible. “Fowler was afraid of applying too much pressure. But he was equally afraid of not finding out all he could about the goose’s unusual oviparity.
So he studied Norman. It was like watching a shadow. Norman seemed to have none of the higher reflexes; his activities were little more than tropism. Ego-consciousness was present, certainly, but—where had he come from? What sort of place or time had it been? Or was Norman simply a freak, a lunatic, a mutation? All that seemed certain was that part of his brain didn’t know its own function. Without conscious will or volition, it was useless. Fowler had to supply the volition; he had to give orders. Between orders, Norman simply sat, occasionally quivering slightly.
It was bewildering. It was fascinating.
Also, it might be a little dangerous. Fowler had no intention of letting his captive escape if he could help it, but vague recollections of peonage disturbed him sometimes. Probably this was illegal. Norman ought to be in an institution, under medical care. But then, Norman had such unusual talents!
Fowler, to salve his uneasiness, ceased to lock the door of the windowless room. By now he had discovered it was unnecessary, anyhow. Norman was like a subject in deep hypnosis. He would obey when told not to leave the room. Fowler, with a layman’s knowledge of law, thought that probably gave him an out. He pictured himself in the dock blandly stating that Norman had never been a prisoner, had always been free to leave the house if he chose.
Actually, only hunger would rouse Norman to disobey Fowler’s commands to stay in his room. He would have to be almost famished, even then, before he would go to the kitchen and eat whatever he found, without discrimination and apparently without taste.
Time went by. Fowler was reorienting, though he scarcely knew it yet, toward a whole new set of values. He let his illustrating dwindle away until he almost ceased to accept orders. This was after an abortive experiment with Norman in which he tried to work out on paper an equivalent of the telepathic pictures on glass. If he could simply sit and think his drawings onto bristol board—
That was, however, one of Norman’s failures.
It wasn’t easy to refrain from sharing this wonderful new secret with Veronica. Fowler found himself time and again shutting his lips over the information just in time. He didn’t invite her out to the house any more; Norman was too often working at odd jobs around the premises. Beautiful visions of the future were building up elaborately in Fowler’s mind—Veronica wrapped in mink and pearls, himself commanding financial empires all based on Norman’s extraordinary talents and Norman’s truly extraordinary willingness to obey.
That was because of his physical weakness, Fowler felt sure. It seemed to take so much of Norman’s energy simply to breathe and eat that nothing remained. And after the solution of a problem, a complete fatigue overcame him. He was useless for a day or two between jobs, recovering from the utter exhaustion that work seemed to induce.
Fowler was quite willing to accept that. It made him even surer of his—guest. The worst thing that could happen, of course, would be Norman’s recovery, his return to normal—
Money began to come in very satisfactorily, although Fowler wasn’t really a good business man. In fact, he was a remarkably poor one. It didn’t matter much. There was always more where the first had come from.
With some of the money Fowler started cautiou
s inquiries about missing persons. He wanted to be sure no indignant relatives would turn up and demand an accounting of all this money. He questioned Norman futilely.
Norman simply could not talk. His mind was too empty for coherence. He could produce words, but he could not connect them. And this was a thing that seemed to give him his only real trouble. For he wanted desperately sometimes to speak. There was something he seemed frantic to tell Fowler, in the intervals when his strength was at its peak.
Fowler didn’t want to know it. Usually when Norman reached this pitch he set him another exhausting problem. Fowler wondered for awhile just why he dreaded hearing the message. Presently he faced the answer.
Norman might be trying to explain how he could be cured.
Eventually, Fowler had to face an even more unwelcome truth. Norman did seem in spite of everything to be growing stronger.
He was working one day on a vibratory headset gimmick later to be known as a Hed-D-Acher, when suddenly he threw down his tools and faced Fowler over the table with a look that bordered on animation—for Norman.
“Sick—” he said painfully. “I . . . know . . . work!” It was an anathema. He made a defiant gesture and pushed the tools away.
Fowler, with a sinking sensation, frowned at the rebellious nonentity.
“All right, Norman,” he said soothingly. “All right. You can rest when you finish this job. You must finish it first, though. You must finish this job, Norman. Do you understand that? You must finish—”
It was sheer accident, of course—or almost accident—that the job turned out to be much more complicated than Fowler had expected. Norman, obedient to the slow, repeated commands, worked very late and very hard.
The end of the job found him so completely exhausted he couldn’t speak or move for three days.
As a matter of fact it was the Hed-D-Acher that turned out to be an important milestone in Fowler’s progress. He couldn’t recognize it at the time, but when he looked back, years later, he saw the occasion of his first serious mistake. His first, that is, unless you count the moment when he lifted Norman across his threshold at the very start of the thing.
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